hickman-amerindian-apocalypse.pdf (PDFy mirror)

Jared The Book of Mormon

Hickman as Amerindian Apocalypse

I n October 1830, just months after he published The
Book of Mormon in Palmyra, New York, new prophet Joseph Smith
commanded Parley P. Pratt and others to light out for Indian Territory
to share the new scripture (Givens and Grow 2011, 44-48). The reason
they felt compelled to undertake this task, despite the youthful fragility
of their movement and the physical dangers and legal difficulties that
stood in their way: early Mormons considered The Book of Mormon to
be a "the record of [Amerindians'] forefathers," a group of Israelites
led by the patriarch Lehi, who fled Jerusalem around 600 BCE before
the Babylonian invasion (Pratt 1972, 51, 54-55; Smith 1981, cited here-
after by book, chapter, and verse in the text). According to the narra-
tive, shortly after Lehi's American landing, two of his sons, Laman and
Lemuel, are cursed by God with "a skin of blackness" in order to sepa-
rate them and their progeny from their righteous and "fair" brother
Nephi and his record-keeping descendants, the narrators of The Book
of Mormon (2 Nephi 5:21; Alma 3:8). These dark-skinned "Lamanites"
were understood by early Mormons to be the progenitors of the Native
peoples of the Americas. On the basis of this foundational opposition,
The Book of Mormon becomes, on multiple levels, a racial 1 apocalypse,
albeit a contrarian one. Not only in the immediate temporal frame of
the narrative do the dark Lamanites extinguish the fair Nephites in a
thousand-year war; in the narrative's prophetically extended temporal
frame, which encompasses the nineteenth-century moment of its read-
ers, the resurgence of the Lamanites' Amerindian descendants in ante-
bellum America, by more bloodshed if necessary, is imagined. In an
almost perfect inversion of (post-) Puritan racial theology, The Book of

American Literature, Volume 86, Number 3, September 2014

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2717371 © 2014 by Duke University Press

430 American Literature

Mormon prophesies that Indian Israel, rather than the interloping
Euro-American Gentiles, will erect a New Jerusalem on the Ameri-
can continent (compare Fenton 2013, 355-56). In an era when the
prevailing providentialist paradigm in the United States at best fos-
tered a tragic image of "the vanishing Indian," it is perhaps no surprise
that early readers of The Book of Mormon, whether they converted to
Mormonism or not, located its theological interest not in its explicit
Christian-doctrinal statements, which seemed derivative, but rather in
the novel racial eschatology implicit in its narrative premises ("[From
The Exeter News-Letter] The Book of Mormon," New-Hampshire Patriot,
September 19, 1831; Bushman 2005, 94-99; Givens 2002, 89-116; Giv-
ens 2009, 69-74; Vogel 1986). For those who did convert, like Pratt,
The Book of Mormon inspired a "Mormon version of Manifest Destiny"
that posed more than an imaginary threat to the US state (Mauss 2003,
55; see also Farmer 2008, 57-58). In response to Book of Mormon proph-
ecies, early Mormons continually relocated on the advancing west-
ern frontier near "the borders of the Lamanites" — from Far West,
Missouri, to Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt Lake City, Utah — in the hopes of
forming a Mormon-Lamanite alliance that would hasten the building
of the New Jerusalem (Walker 1989, 1993). The Book of Mormon thus
keyed the formation of an alternative chosen people — Mormons and
Indians — whose millennial triumph, from the perspective of many
Euro-Christians, amounted to the foreclosure of the nation's providen-
tial expansion. In fact, (Book of) Mormon millenarianism dovetailed
with contemporaneous Amerindian spiritualities so productively that
Gregory Smoak (2006, 71-73) goes so far as to say that The Book of
Mormon has "forever linked" Mormonism with American Indian pro-
phetic movements.

The first evidence for Smoak's historical judgment is Pratt's account
of his brief ministry among a group of Delaware, or Lenni Lenape,
west of the Missouri River. The Delaware were pioneers of the eigh-
teenth-century "nativist great awakening" that galvanized eastern
tribes between the French and Indian and 1812 wars (Dowd 1992,
29-46). This context, Lori Taylor (2000, 307-8) reminds us, is perhaps
as important for The Book of Mormon as the Second Great Awakening:
The Book of Mormon "came forth" not just in the "burnt-over district" of
upstate New York amid revivalist talk of sin and salvation but in "Iro-
quois country" where nativist leaders like Red Jacket still voiced their
alternative conception of the continental past and future (2000, 307-8,

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 431

342-44) . The Delaware prophet Neolin was one of the first to articulate
a vision of what might be called Amerindian apocalypse, which, at its
core, promised the triumphant Native repossession of the continent by
way of refusing Euro- Christian and restoring and reinventing Native
lifeways. The Delaware leader with whom Pratt parleyed in January
1831 was William Anderson, or Kikthawenund, an aged chief who had
lived the successes and failures of the nativist movement firsthand.
The son of a Swedish father and Delaware mother, Kikthawenund had
presided over multiple phases of the Delaware diaspora — from their
original homelands around the Delaware River Valley to Ohio and Indi-
ana (where the town of Anderson is named after him) and, finally, to
Indian Territory in what is today Kansas, where he and his people had
recently arrived when Pratt encountered them. Although Kikthawe-
nund and the Delaware council elected not to join Tecumseh's pan-
Indian confederacy around the time of the War of 1812, this decision
should not be taken as evidence that Kikthawenund had abandoned
nativist spirituality but rather, perhaps, that he and many other Dela-
wares had already suffered so much for the cause. A Moravian mis-
sionary who proselytized among the Delawares on Indiana's White
River during the first decade of the nineteenth century characterized
Kikthawenund not only as "not inclined ... to Christianity" but as
actively involved in "mak[ing] his people averse to it" (Gipson 1938,
608; see also Bowes 2007, 40-41). The man Pratt met twenty years
later — despite the crushing defeat of Tecumseh's alliance and his own
people's repeated dislocations in the interim — seems not at all to have
relented in his nativist convictions. By Pratt's account, Kikthawenund
was "at first unwilling to call his council ... as he had ever been opposed
to the introduction of missionaries among his tribe" (1972, 53-57).
What reportedly changed this die-hard nativist's mind was the fact that
these missionaries were not peddling the Bible but a different book of
scripture that purportedly spoke directly of and to him and his people.
Dismissal of the Bible had been central to the nativist rejection of Euro-
Christianity. As Gregory Dowd (1992, 30) has shown, a standing argu-
ment of many nativists against Euro- Christian missionaries was that
the Bible applied only to Europeans insofar as God had not seen fit to
give the book to Amerindians or Africans. According to Pratt (1972,
53-57), once Kikthawenund began "to understand the nature of the
Book [of Mormon] . . . he . . . became suddenly interested," eventually
embracing '"the good news . . . concerning the Book of our forefathers;

432 American Literature

it makes us glad in here' — placing his hand on his heart." The preach-
ing of this alternative gospel reportedly caused such a stir among the
Delaware that it "stirred up the jealousy and envy of the Indian agents
and sectarian missionaries to that degree that we were soon ordered
out of the Indian country as disturbers of the peace."

Although one must certainly make allowances for Mormon propa-
gandizing and Delaware politicking, it seems clear from this episode
that The Book of Mormon answered (to) long-standing questions about
the adequacy of the Bible in relation to the sacred-historical meaning
of the Americas and their peoples. The fact that these did not clearly
come up for description in established sources "widened already exist-
ing cracks in the canon" of traditional knowledge into "frightening cre-
vasses," stripping even the Bible of some of its "aura of completeness,"
Anthony Grafton states (1992, 197-256; see also Livingstone 2008,
1-51). As a possible asymptote of the Bible's universal claim, America
has produced both the most strident extensions and the boldest super-
sessions of biblical authority — the literalist hermeneutics of American
evangelicalism and the new revelations of prophetic movements like
nativism and Mormonism. One sees both kinds of grappling with bibli-
cal limitation at the limits of the nation in the case at hand. Pratt and
Kikthawenund's synergy alarmed federal agents and sectarian mis-
sionaries alike, because it threatened an apocalyptic eclipse of the
dominant apocalyptic narrative not only envisioned but being enacted
in the antebellum United States. In that narrative, eventually slogan-
ized as "Manifest Destiny," God had revealed Euro-Americans' war-
rant to colonize a promised land at the expense of Native and African
Americans (Guyatt 2007, 173-258). This apocalyptic narrative of white
supremacy was enabled by a particular conjuncture of biblicism and
racism. As Mark Noll (2002, 418) has masterfully shown, "the problem
with race and the Bible [in the antebellum US] was far more profound
than the interpretation of any one text ... [It was] a problem brought
about by the intuitive character of the reigning American hermeneu-
tic," which enabled "commonsense reading of the Bible" and common-
sense racism to reinforce each other (see also Noll 1982, 39-58). A
vicious circle developed: antebellum American readers predisposed by
their sociocultural location to racism were authorized under the reign-
ing hermeneutic to read that racism into a text that had been elevated
to the status of literal word of God, thereby making their racism appear
to originate from a source not only other but higher than themselves.

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 433

White domination acquired the sheen of incontestable divine decree.
The Book of Mormon severs this vicious circle by simultaneously negat-
ing the authority deposited by literalist hermeneuts in "the Bible
alone" and diametrically opposing another vision of racial apocalypse.
Its form (indeed, its sheer facticity) and its content pointed up the — in
multiple senses — partiality of biblicist nationalism at a moment when
biblicist nationalism's practical and theoretical force seemed most
comprehensive. In early 1831, as Jackson's Indian removal policy was
squelching nativism east of the Mississippi, we find The Book of Mor-
mon seemingly offering some measure of spiritual reinvigoration to a
world-weary nativist like Kikthawenund.

Almost since its publication, then, The Book of Mormon has furnished
a "fertile symbolic ground" for affirmations of Amerindian cultural and
spiritual identity, anthropologist Thomas Murphy notes (1999, 455).
To reel off a few examples: Mormons were variously involved in each of
the upsurges of the nineteenth-century Ghost Dance — perhaps the
locus classicus of Amerindian apocalypse, leading Smoak (2006,
75-80, 124-26, 166-71) to characterize "Ghost Dancing [as] a religious
conversation between native peoples and . . . Mormons, concerning
both peoples' identity and destiny." South of the border, the Mexican
Mormon convert Margarito Bautista Valencia produced a massive
work of amateur scholarship in 1935 that grafted modern Mexican his-
tory onto Book of Mormon history in a flurry of triumphalist nationalism.
His confidence in The Book of Mormon's vision of Amerindian apoca-
lypse prompted him to challenge the authority of white Mormon lead-
ers in Utah over the Mexican saints, which galvanized like-minded
Mexican Mormons (around a third of the total membership) in a sepa-
ratist movement called the Third Convention (Murphy 1997, 1998,
2000). More recently, Navajo Mormon leader George P. Lee was excom-
municated for similarly citing The Book of Mormon as prooftext that the
primary architects of the American New Jerusalem were to be the
Amerindian descendants of Jacob, not the Euro-American Gentiles
(Lee 1989). Some contemporary Mayan Mormons interpret the Popol
Vuh as a sacred Lamanite record that should be read alongside The
Book of Mormon (Murphy 1996, 2000). The Mormon topos of The Book
of Mormon as an "unpaid debt" of Euro-American Gentiles to Indian
Israel implicitly identifies The Book of Mormon as an Amerindian cul-
tural legacy, leading Lacee Harris, a Mormon of Northern Ute and Pai-
ute ancestry, candidly to query: "When people tell me that my traditions

434 American Literature

develop from The Book of Mormon, I ask, 'Then why do I have to give up
those traditions to be a Mormon?'" (1985, 151). These instances dis-
close The Book of Mormon's persistent agency in a complex process
whereby "reculturation" (Wyss 2000, 53) — the rendering of Amerin-
dian culture in the entirely foreign terms of Judeo- Christian sacred
history — leads to transculturation — the novel affordance of a "Laman-
ite subjectivity" (Murphy 2000) that empowers Native peoples — which,
in turn, opens on the possibility of an ethnoculturation that (revalo-
rizes the very cultural particularities elided by the initial reculturation:
The Book of Mormon collapses into Popol Vuh. The Book of Mormon's
ready instrumentality in this process, I want to argue, makes it other
than Euro-Christian.

No doubt the question arises as to how such a reading of The Book
of Mormon can be squared with the fact that the text's most devoted
readership — members of the LDS (Latter Day Saints) Church — has a
deplorable record of theological racism. It can be argued that The Book
of Mormon produces a dualism of "Indian-as-brother" and "Indian-as-
other," as Jared Farmer has put it (2008, 61; see also 57, 81, and 366-
67). And amid the difficulties of actual intercultural encounter between
Euro-American Mormons and Indians, it is undeniable that most Euro-
American Mormons predictably disidentified with Indians in the terms
"ordinary white racism" (Mauss 2003, 64). Hence, although, as
Armand Mauss (2003, 42, 63, 68) rightly maintains, "the great major-
ity of the white converts" to Mormonism "took very seriously the por-
trayal of the Indians in the Book of Mormon as Lamanites — that is, as
literal Israelites . . . destined to recover the spiritual and cultural great-
ness of God's chosen people," it is also clear that many Euro-American
Mormons regarded contemporary Indians as the dark savages the
white Nephite narrators often represented their ancestors to be — lost
souls once in need of white Nephite paternalism and now in need of
white Euro-American "Gentiles . . . [to] be like unto a father to them"
(2 Nephi 10:18). Furthermore, early Euro-American Mormon leaders
occasionally downplayed the more radical implications of The Book of
Mormon as a strategy of self-preservation. When the fledgling Mormon
movement brought its largely northern constituency to the frontier
slave state of Missouri in the mid- 1830s, charges of fomenting insurrec-
tion among the Indians and harboring fugitive slaves were almost
immediately leveled, and some Mormons overzealously deflected
those charges in order to secure a place in the sacred circle of white-

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 435

ness (Prentiss 2003, 130). Consequently, at best Mormonism devel-
oped an "ambivalent theology of the Lamanite," allowing white Mor-
mons to "practice a flexible 'politics of the Indian'" that more often than
not has bent toward the status quo (Parry 1985, 74). In recent years,
any potential The Book of Mormon might have to foster a Lamanite lib-
eration theology has been further undermined by the glaring incom-
patibility of DNA research on Amerindian peoples with Book of Mor-
mon claims. Mormon literalists have found themselves forced to shrink
the speculative geography of The Book of Mormon to such a narrow
extent as to raise the question of whether there is any meaningful rela-
tion, genealogical or otherwise, between ancient Lamanites and con-
temporary Amerindians. 2 Thus, the book whose primary source of
interest was once as a history of Indians is now read in some quarters
as having little to say about or to Amerindian people in particular.

The perhaps perverse stance of this essay is that, beyond these
vicissitudes of interpretation, The Book of Mormon's formal logic and
not just its eschatological content has made and will continue to make
its theology of Native and/or nonwhite liberation irrepressible. As
early as 1844, the mixed Native and African American writer-activist
Robert Benjamin Lewis, "true father of Afrocentrism's wilder theo-
ries" (Howe 1998, 38), seamlessly incorporated The Book of Mormon
into a polemic vaunting the past and future greatness of the darker
races (Lewis 1844, 34; on Lewis, see also Bay 2000, 44-46 and Ernest
2004, 101-13). Andress V. Lewis (no relation, apparently), a member
of the "committee of coloured gentlemen" that published Lewis's Light
and Truth in Boston, was the brother of Walker Lewis, one of the first
African American converts to Mormonism and an abolitionist who,
along with the likes of David Walker and William Cooper Nell, was a
charter member of the Massachusetts General Colored Association
(O'Donovan 2006; on the affinities of The Book of Mormon and Walker's
1929 Appeal, see Bushman 2005, 99). Randall Moon (1993, 53nl) notes
the strikingly similar uses to which the Pequot Methodist minister
William Apess put Indian-Israelite theory in the same time and place
Smith was publishing and disseminating The Book of Mormon. Such
historical connections, sketchy though they are, further suggest a
potential nonwhite attraction to The Book of Mormon from the time of
its publication. As recently as 2000, the self-proclaimed Eritrean
prophet Embaye Melekin (not a member of the LDS church), authored
an exhaustive commentary on The Book of Mormon that, in the wake

436 American Literature

of DNA's problematization of the Indians-as-Israelites theory, reinter-
prets the LDS scripture as an account of the migration of a group of
Israelites not to the Americas but to the east coast of Africa. The read-
erly transformation Melekin undergoes as he plods straight through
The Book of Mormon in many ways exemplifies the argument I will
offer here. Melekin, initially self-identified as light-skinned and exclu-
sively "Eritrean," begins by aligning himself with the white Nephite
narrators over and against the black Lamanites — here coded as black
sub-Saharan "Africans." But he ends by hailing the text's eschatologi-
cal elevation of the Lamanites, which in his scheme signifies the even-
tual apotheosis of black Africa, to which he finally understands him-
self proudly to belong (Melekin 2000). Despite the blunting of its
radical edge over nearly two centuries by its primarily Euro-American
Mormon interpreters, and even in the absence of its historical func-
tion as an explanation of Indian origins, The Book of Mormon text itself
seems consistently to inspire a radical racialized apocalypticism.

A Reading of The Book of Mormon as Metacritique
of Theological Racism

The Book of Mormon seems to mythologize "the Jacksonian view of
Indians common to most Americans in 1830" (Bushman 2005, 98):

And [the Lord] caused the cursing to come upon [Laman and Lem-
uel] , yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity . . . wherefore,
as they were white, and exceeding fair and delightsome, that they
might not be enticing unto my [their brother Nephi, the narrator's]
people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon
them. . . . And because of this cursing which was upon them, they
did become an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety, and did seek
in the wilderness for beasts of prey. (2 Nephi 5:21-24)

My burden is necessarily to show how this patent racism is somehow
undone by the very text in which it is articulated. My claim is not only
that The Book of Mormon ultimately does undo its rac(ial)ist orthodoxy
but that it undertakes this undoing in such a way as to provide a meta-
critique of theological racism, that is, a critique of theological racism
by way of a critique of available critiques of theological racism. The
Book of Mormon escorts the reader through several levels of insuffi-
cient critique of its foundational racism in order to arrive at a rather

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 437

audacious insight in antebellum America's biblicist culture: racism is
of such an order as to require nothing less than new ways of reading
scripture and, indeed, new scripture altogether — fresh revelation from
God himself.

Level 1: Troubling Racial Categories

The first level on which The Book of Mormon might seem to undo its
racist dichotomy of righteous white Nephite and wicked black Laman-
ite is by partially unsettling the cut-and-dried contours and contents of
these categories. On a macro level, the prolific, crabbed narrative of The
Book of Mormon might seem to mitigate its foundational racist dichot-
omy by generating demographic doubles. Near the end of the narrative,
The Book of Mormon effectively upstages the central story of Lehi's
descendants by including the brief account of an earlier migration
of Old World peoples to the Americas — the Jaredites, survivors of the
destruction of the Tower of Babel (Ether). The highly compressed
story of their two -thousand-year tragic downfall is editorially inter-
posed in The Book of Mormon right before the final annihilation of the
Nephites as an epitome that underlines the moral of the main narra-
tive. But insofar as it provides an additional case study of New World
declension in which racial curses do not figure, it arguably relativizes
the Manichean drama of white Nephites versus black Lamanites.
The text further complicates rac(ial)ist considerations by having this
temporally prior demographic double — the Jaredites — meet up, centu-
ries later, with a demographic double contemporaneous with the
Lehite lineage (Lamanites and Nephites), yet another group of emi-
grants, who left Jerusalem around the same time as Lehi and his family,
led by Mulek, the son of Zedekiah, king of Judah (Omni 1:13-22). The
last Jaredite, Coriantumr, is taken in by these Mulekites, whom the
Nephites subsequently discover in the course of their flight from the
Lamanites. If the Jaredites are constructed as ominous foreshadowers
of the Nephites, then the Mulekites are their benighted doppelgang-
ers — unlike Lehi and his family, they failed to bring Israelite sacred
writings with them and so exist in a pitiful state of civilization without
a coherent language or religion. But although spiritually and culturally
superior to the Mulekites, the Nephites are numerically inferior —
and vulnerable refugees, to boot — and so are absorbed by the Mule-
kites in their "land of Zarahemla," which remains the Nephite home

438 American Literature

base for the rest of the narrative. The significance of this demographic
shift is registered in the narrative structure itself, for the absorption of
Nephites by Mulekites marks the transition from the spiritually
focused "small plates" of Nephi to the more secular "large plates" of
The Book of Mormon, which present the abridged history of Nephite-
Lamanite relations as filtered through the retrospective viewpoint of
the book's eponymous editor. It might be argued that this conspicuous
narrative seam where The Book of Mormon braids together its multiple
beginnings — Jaredites, Nephites, and Mulekites — implicitly interro-
gates the nature and authority of origins: Amid the sheer prolifera-
tion and interpenetration of founding "-ites" traced above, who are
the "Nephites" now? What does "Nephite" mean? Or look like? At the
same time, the relative seamlessness with which the Nephites merge
into the numerically dominant Mulekites and the Mulekites assume
the name of the spiritually and culturally advanced Nephites (the label
Mulekite immediately drops from the text) suggests that any other-
ness of the Mulekites pales by comparison to that of the Lamanites,
whose attacks drove the Nephites into the bosom of the Mulekites in
the first place. The alternative geneses represented by the Jaredites
and Mulekites — the former so much earlier in time as to be available
only as foreboding precedent and the latter so readily enfolded into the
Nephite story as to appear as a counterfactual blip, implying, in effect,
the identity of Mulekites with Nephites — ultimately don't decenter or
defuse the racialized Nephite/Lamanite agon.

The same might be said of subsequent demographic changes around
which the text explicitly retheorizes its racial categories. At times, the
text seems to destabilize Lamaniteness by proliferating and empha-
sizing signs other than "the skin of blackness." The Nephite prophet
Alma notes that a dissenting group of wicked Nephites led by one
Amlici "distinguished [themselves] from the Nephites" by marking
themselves "with red in their foreheads after the manner of the Lama-
nites" (Alma 3:4). So have the "Amlicites," as they're inevitably called,
(also) become "Lamanites," with whom they indeed join forces against
the Nephites (Alma 2:24) ? This multiplication of "Lamanite" "marks" —
red-painted foreheads, shorn heads, wicked traditions — that are read-
ily transferable as skin color is not seems to open the door to a religio-
cultural rather than ethnoracial definition of "Lamanite" (Alma 43:13).
But these redefinitions have inescapable limits that can be overcome
only by somewhat dubious logic chopping. 3 Although Alma raises the

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 439

possibility of the white "Lamanite," that is, an alternatively "marked"
but nonetheless phenotypically white practitioner of wicked traditions
"after the manner of the Lamanites," it is supremely telling that the
racial corollary — a black "Nephite," that is, a practitioner of righteous
"Nephite" traditions who simply happens to be nonwhite — proves an
unthinkable proposition. The book of Alma details the evangelizing
mission of the sons of the Nephite king, Mosiah, to Lamanite lands,
which results in the conversion of the Lamanite king and many of his
subjects. By Alma's standard, because these people had ceased "to
believe in the tradition of the Lamanites, but believed those records
which were brought out of the land of Jerusalem," they were "no more
called Lamanites" (Alma 3:11; 23:16-17). But it seems they can't be
called "Nephites" either — they are known as the "Anti-Nephi-Lehies"
or the "Ammonites" (after one of the Nephite missionaries who bap-
tized them) (Alma 56:57, 57:6). That is, they can't be called "Nephites"
until they become phenotypically white. Conversion allows these Lama-
nites to "open a correspondence with [the Nephites] ," and the conse-
quences seem to be more than religio-cultural. We are told that "the
curse of God did no more follow them" (Alma 23:18). If at this point it is
at all ambiguous what this signifies, it is made crystal clear after a sub-
sequent wave of Lamanite conversion: "Those Lamanites who had
united with the Nephites were numbered among the Nephites; And
their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like
unto the Nephites; And their young men and their daughters became
exceedingly fair, and they were numbered among the Nephites, and
were called Nephites" (3 Nephi 2:12-16). In Book of Mormon history
and reception history, spiritual enlightenment is ever haunted by the
promise of racial enwhitenment. Lamanite righteousness seems Ideo-
logically bound to take the form of phenotypical whiteness. There's no
such thing as a black Nephite, at least not for long. By the same token,
despite the fact that the initial articulation of the Lamanite curse prom-
ises that "the seed of him that mixeth with [the Lamanites'] seed" (con-
sider the many Nephite dissenting groups like the Amlicites) "shall be
cursed even with the same cursing," Nephite wickedness never explic-
itly and dramatically manifests as phenotypical blackness (2 Nephi
5:23). We never get an analogous pronouncement for any Nephites that
"the curse of God did fall upon them." On this point, it seems signifi-
cant that the prophet Jacob's jeremiad against the Nephites — in view of
comparative Lamanite righteousness at the time — culminates not in

440 American Literature

"unless ye shall repent of your sins," your skins will be blacker than
theirs, but rather, "their skins shall be whiter than yours" (Jacob 3:8).

As a last line of defense against charges of The Book of Mormon's rac-
ism, some liberal Mormon commentators turn to the two-hundred-
year period of social harmony that follows Jesus's visitation of the
Americas in order to suggest the narrative's eventual eclipse of racial
matters (see England 1985). During this period there were reportedly
not "any manner of -ites," and black and white peoples presumably
intermarried insofar as they "were in one, the children of Christ and
heirs to the kingdom of God" (4 Nephi 1:17). But, by the narrative's own
lights, such universalism would have had a particular racial expres-
sion: the necessary outcome of this millennial mingling would be a
wholesale whitening of those people sufficiently righteous to have sur-
vived the apocalyptic destruction attendant upon Christ's Old World
crucifixion. When this Utopian social order subsequently begins to
break down, the old racial labels resurface, and the text initially wants
to distinguish this revival of the categories as religiocultural rather
than ethnoracial. It explicitly contrasts the "new" "Lamanites"' "hate"
of "the children of God" with the "old" "Lamanites"' hate of "the chil-
dren of Nephi from the beginning," tracing their identity to "revolt
from the church" rather than racial difference (4 Nephi 1:20, 37-39).
But if, as the narrative implies, by the end of the two hundred years
of mass righteousness the people were phenotypically white (r), then
what does it mean that a mere two hundred years later, at the close
of the narrative, we are left only with the surviving "Lamanites," who
are implicitly nonwhite insofar as they are understood to be the prin-
cipal ancestors of modern Amerindians? The eponymous Mormon
emphasizes the religiocultural identity of Nephites and Lamanites at
the end — they engage in the same morally depraved practices — and
reasserts their difference in racial terms. He eulogizes the Nephites
as his "fair ones," and he prophesies that the descendants of the Lama-
nite survivors "shall become a dark, filthy, and a loathsome people,
beyond the description of that which ever hath been amongst us"
(Mormon 4:10-12; 6:16-20; 5:15). While this may imply the Lamanites
were white (r) at this time, at least by comparison to their modern
Amerindian descendants, Lamanites seem ever destined to be "back
in black." The Nephites, whether safely within or hopelessly beyond a
state of grace, remain "fair ones," whereas the Lamanites become white
when they attain grace but relapse into blackness when they lose it.

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 441

Regardless of virtue, the curse of a "skin of blackness" never quite
seems to lift from its original targets, the Lamanites, and to descend on
the Nephites. From beginning to end, racial difference trumps moral
equivalence. The deck is perhaps stacked in a text whose white Nephite
narrators repeatedly symbolize the state of grace through the color
white: the fruit of the tree of life in Lehi's allegory of salvation is "white,
to exceed all the whiteness I had ever seen"; and sanctification is fre-
quently figured as having one's "garments washed white in the blood
of the Lamb" (1 Nephi 8:11; Alma 5:21; 13:11). Physical and spiritual
"darkness" robustly reinforce rather than neatly sift out from each
other. The Book of Mormon thus performs the failure of a critique of
racism whose main focus is to highlight the instability of rac(ial)ist
categories. Instead, it demonstrates the perdurance of those catego-
ries even when their contents and contexts seem to change.

Level 2: Nephite Self-De(con)struction

The Book of Mormon plays out and shows the limitations of another
form of antiracist critique, which might be described, following George
Fredrickson ([1971] 1987), as romantic-racialist resignation before
the eschatological elevation of the Other. The Book of Mormon is pain-
fully framed by the awareness — first prophetic and finally firsthand —
of the divinely appointed destruction of the white Nephites at the hands
of the dark Lamanites. Nephi sees the end of his American promised
land before he even arrives: "And it came to pass that I beheld, and saw
the people of the seed of my brethren [the Lamanites] that they had
overcome my seed [the Nephites]; and they went forth in multitudes
upon the face of the land" (1 Nephi 12:20). The Nephites always already
know that they are not to rise to the ranks of world-historical peoples.
This foreknowledge of their inevitable end shapes the narrative in pro-
found ways. Nephite anticipation of self-destruction engages the narra-
tive in self-deconstruction. For example, just after announcing the
extinction of his people, the final Nephite narrator, Moroni, beseeches
readers to see beyond the "imperfections" in the record he is about to
deposit, thereby linking civilizational and narrative failure (Mormon
8:7-12). The Nephite narrators know that, in the end, they are a nega-
tive example: "Condemn me not because of mine imperfection,"
Moroni pleads, "neither my father [Mormon] , because of his imperfec-
tion, neither them who have written before him; but rather give thanks

442 American Literature

unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections,
that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been" (Mormon 9:31).
To some extent, the Nephite narrators beat the ideology critic to the
punch by writing without triumphalist illusions, drawing attention to
and apologizing for potential aporias in their narrative (compare Hardy
2010, 9-10).

Even more strikingly, this tragic Nephite eschatology envisions
not only Nephite extinction but Lamanite exaltation. In a kind of zero-
sum game, the ancient ignominy of the Nephites is made inversely pro-
portional to the future glory of the descendants of the Lamanites —
modern Amerindians. It is as though the (self-) critique of Nephite
civilization cannot be complete without the ironic twist that the nar-
rative's bugbear becomes the bearer of its best hopes. Knowing that
their people will be extinguished, knowing that their record will be
lost, the Nephite prophets address themselves to the descendants of
their Lamanite "brethren" (Moroni 10:1-5). Nephite prophethood
comes in some sense to be defined by a felt sense of stewardship for
the posterity of one's mortal enemies. The early prophet Enos goes so
far as to bind God in the following covenant: "If it should so be, that my
people, the Nephites, should fall into transgression, and by any means
be destroyed, and the Lamanites should not be destroyed, that the
Lord God would preserve a record of his holy arm, that it might be
brought forth at some future day unto the Lamanites, that, perhaps,
they might be brought unto salvation" (Enos 1:14; compare Jarom 1:2).
One hears two contradictory strains in Enos's prayer and in much of
the white Nephite narrators' self-effacement. On the one hand, there is
a disarming concession of any claim of providential superiority to the
Lamanites in view of the foreseen course of sacred history. The Book of
Mormon is history written not by the victors but the vanquished, and
the Nephite narrators are not sore losers — they don't blame the ref-
eree in the sky but rather their own failures. Even while locked in the
final battle to the death with the Lamanites, The Book of Mormon's
eponymous editor (also a Nephite general) directly addresses their
descendants, impressing on them their identity as "people of the first
covenant" and wishing them the blessings of that relation (Mormon
7: 10) . On the title page, Mormon defines the primary audience and pur-
pose of his book in terms of Amerindian destiny rather than Judeo-
Christian testimony. As he puts it, the book is first "written to the
Lamanites, who are a remnant of the house of Israel" and then "also to

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 443

Jew and Gentile" (title page; compare Jarom 1:2). In this scheme, New
World Israel — the Amerindians who descend from the Lamanites —
trumps both Gentile Euro-America and Old World Israel. Mormon
establishes the book's primary intention as "show[ing] unto the rem-
nant of the House of Israel [the Lamanite- descended Amerindians]
what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers; and that they
may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off for-
ever" (title page). Only secondarily is the book aimed at "the convinc-
ing of the Jew and the Gentile that jesus is the Christ, the eternal god,
manifesting himself unto all nations" (title page). Although contempo-
rary Mormon interpretation has tended to reverse these priorities, in
Mormon's estimation, the scripture's preeminent function is to reha-
bilitate Lamanite race pride at a historical nadir, rather than to spread
the good news of the Christian Gospel to white Americans. Hence,
although white Nephites carve out The Book of Mormon narrative, it is
a Lamanite book in relief.

On the other hand, there is something suspiciously sanctimonious
about the Nephites' good sportsmanship, a pride smuggled in with all
that humility. One might hear in Enos's plea for the preservation of the
Nephite record not only selfless Christian love for one's enemies but
a perpetuation of the text's foundational racial hierarchy. Yes, in view
of Nephite extinction, the success of the white Nephite narrative is
inextricably bound with the providential ascendancy of the Lamanites.
But the flip side is that that providential ascendancy is to be mediated
by the white Nephite narrative itself. Enos and the other white Nephite
narrators imagine that when their record finally comes to light in the
nineteenth century, the descendants of the Lamanites will still need to
be "brought unto salvation," and they make their long-lost record the
primary agent of that salvation. Hence, although reduced to "voices
from the dust," the Nephite narrators — through the recovery of The
Book of Mormon — remain in the position of telling the descendants of
the Lamanites who they really are and how they should be (2 Nephi
3:19; 33:13; Mormon 8:23; Moroni 10:27). In sum, although the white
Nephite narrators, like many nineteenth-century romantic racialists,
accept being upstaged by the dark Other, they reserve for themselves
the indispensable function of stage-managing the eschatological drama.
For all its self-critique, the eschatology proffered by the white Nephite
narrators preserves, in somewhat softer form, white Nephite superior-
ity and centrality.

444 American Literature

Level 3: Apocalypse in the Text/Apocalypse of the Text

The Book of Mormon's apocalypse is even more profound than the
extraordinary reversal the white Nephite narrators countenance. In the
end, not only the semantic critique of racial categories but the eschato-
logical critique of the racial status quo is compromised by its site of
enunciation — the white Nephite narrative. Ultimately The Book of Mor-
mon shows how the apocalypse announced in and by the text — the
exaltation of the descendants of the Lamanites — entails the apoca-
lypse of that very text — the cancellation of the white Nephite narra-
tive. This is the fulfillment of its self-deconstructive tendency. By vari-
ous means, The Book of Mormon invites us to confront the fact that "as
the putative authors of the record in question, the Nephites were free
to characterize their [Lamanite] antagonists as they wished" (Mauss
2003, 116). It suggests that in order to dismantle the kind of theological
racism the text features, what must be challenged is the very authority
of the narrative that elaborates the framework in the first place. It is the
narrative credibility of white supremacism, however allegedly scrip-
tural its warrant, that must be called into question. Other antebellum
texts attuned to the insidiousness of race perform a similar opera-
tion. Both Benito Cereno and Dred, Peter Coviello (2002) and Gail
Smith (1997) have respectively shown, engineer implosive narrative
structures that dramatically reveal to the sentimental reader, inured to
"racial knowingness," the utter inadequacy of his or her rac(ial)ist
common sense: Herman Melville by conning us into identifying with a
racist omniscient narrator over and against the hapless Captain Del-
ano, thus perhaps catching us in Delano's selfsame blindness to the
slaves' control of the ship; and Harriet Beecher Stowe by lulling us into
a plantation romance only to jolt us with the recognition that a slave
rebellion has been seething beneath the serene surface of the first half
of the novel. The Book of Mormon's version of this trick is much more
threatening. Insofar as The Book of Mormon purports to be scripture,
its self-deconstruction draws attention to that which the literalist her-
meneuts of biblicist America were keen to ignore — the contingent
human conditions of scripture writing and scripture reading, in other
words, precisely the conditions from which might conceivably arise
spurious notions of theological racism.

For many antebellum Americans, certainly those most likely to run
across The Book of Mormon, the Bible was not subject to history; rather,
as the literal word of God, history was subject to it. This effect arose in

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 445

part by virtue of the ur-canonical status the text had attained over cen-
turies of reverence. The Book of Mormon could not possibly replicate
such conditions of reception — the timelessness attached to the Bible
simply as a result of its long-standing authority was inherently unavail-
able to the upstart text. But another source of the effect of biblical time-
lessness that The Book of Mormon could mime in an attempt to arro-
gate authority to itself was the distinctive narrative style of large
portions of the Hebrew Bible. Meir Sternberg (1985) has argued that
the Hebrew Bible's remarkably consistent style of narration, particu-
larly across the historical books — a serene third-person omniscient
narration beneath which any ripple of authorial presence subsides, cre-
ating an overwhelming reality effect — presupposes what he calls an
"inspirational model" of author- and readership. The imperturbable
knowingness of the biblical narrative — which simultaneously effaces
the author and empowers the author to report God's thoughts — could
only arise in a particular religiocultural context in which it was an
"institutional fact" that a supreme divine being could speak through
human beings. Following Sternberg, one could say the Hebrew Bible,
by virtue of being produced by and for literalist readers, on a formal
level presupposes and so produces literalist readers, which of course it
continues to do. The seductive authoritativeness of the biblical voice,
which can seem to come from nowhere, lends itself to the ongoing
reception of the text in many quarters as the word of God. The reader
with ears to hear might indeed hear something like divine omniscience
in the Hebrew Bible's carefully crafted narratorial omniscience (Stern-
berg 1985, esp. 58-128).

Significantly, The Book of Mormon provides a conspicuous and self-
conscious antithesis — or antidote — to this biblical timelessness. It
presents multiple first-person narrators and editors who assiduously
trace the provenance of their work (Fenton 2013, 340-41; Givens 2009,
7-12, 34-35; Hardy 2010, xi-28). In the opening book of Nephi, not only
are readers manhandled at every turn by his aggressive first-person
narration, they are given an account of how Nephi obtained the ore
from which he made the very plates upon which his words are inscribed.
The effect is overwhelming: We are constantly reminded not only that
we are reading Nephi's words but that these words were painstak-
ingly engraved on "plates which I have made with mine own hands"
(1 Nephil:17; Nephi 19:1-7; 2 Nephi 5:28-33). Throughout, the text
eagerly authenticates itself by impressing on the reader the enduring
materiality of a record literally handed down from one writer to the

446 American Literature

next: "Now I, Chemish, write what few things I write, in the same book
with my brother; for behold, I saw the last which he wrote, that he
wrote it with his own hand; and he wrote it in the day that he delivered
them unto me" (Omni 1:9). The Book of Mormon thus works through
rather than around or away from what David Holland has called the
problem of "revelatory particularity" (Holland 2011, 53-54, 147-48;
Hullinger 1992, 154-65). The higher criticism's revelation of the intrac-
table cultural and historical particularity of the Bible necessitated a
reorientation toward revealed religion. Deists took it as occasion to
abandon revealed for natural religion, asking how and why a universal
God would confine Himself entirely to a single book of scripture from
a single region of the world. Evangelicals went the opposite way and
exceptionalized the Bible as the singular repository of God's literal
word, the one-and-only-take-it-or-leave-it revelation. Both solutions
evaded rather than confronted the problem of revelatory particularity,
which demanded a full-blown theory and history of inspiration, of how
and in what measure the divine has been and can be communicated
through human language and action. The Book of Mormon goes some
way in this direction by featuring admittedly imperfect individuals
with exotic names claiming, in the first person, divine knowledge and
then soliciting the reader's assessment of those claims. In so doing,
The Book of Mormon "replicates the process of canon formation," as
Terryl Givens (1997, 83) has put it.

It is a testament to the stagnant polemicism of Book of Mormon stud-
ies that Givens, one of the text's foremost critics, can take The Book of
Mormon's manifest preoccupation with (its own) historicity merely as
occasion to restage the historicity debate rather than as an opportu-
nity to think with the text's sophisticated inquiry into the production of
canonical authority. He leverages the text's self-authenticating ges-
tures toward a characterization of The Book of Mormon as "authori-
tative discourse" (loosely appropriating Bakhtin). He seems to take
this to mean that The Book of Mormon insists on being read in its own
terms, which, in his hands, becomes tantamount to saying that The
Book of Mormon must either be maximally true or abjectly false —
either ancient scripture with universal claim or modern fraud deserv-
ing of universal dismissal, which keeps us trapped in the hermeneuti-
cal dualism that has stunted Book of Mormon criticism (Givens 2009,
123-25). The irony, of course, is that precisely the formal features —
artless first-person narratives, methodical charting of its provenance,

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 447

and incessant reminders of its materiality — through which the nar-
rative wants to claim an unassailable objectivity on par with or even
superior to the Bible can only highlight its overwrought subjectivity
By drawing attention to rather than away from the human medium of
scripture, The Book of Mormon makes literalist hermeneutics in its par-
ticular case and in general a more difficult proposition. Put another
way The Book of Mormon is "Mormon's book," as Grant Hardy has sug-
gested in his fine recent narratological analysis, in a way that, say, the
first book of Samuel is not Samuel's book and, as such, cannot as read-
ily slide into identity with "the word of God" (Hardy 2010, 9-10, 14-16).
A certain friction is generated by the narrative's frank embeddedness
in particular viewpoints and memory practices. Any theological author-
ity accorded to the content is intimately bound up with the identity of
the author-narrator. Who is saying what is said is made to matter, and
this has significant implications for the text's racial politics.

Take Nephi, the narrator of the racial curse of his brothers, Laman
and Lemuel, and, by definition, the text's prototypical white Nephite.
He represents himself as righteously "desirous" to "see, and hear, and
know" for himself all that has been revealed to the Israelite prophetic
tradition and more (1 Nephi 10:17; 1 Nephi 2:16). But his will to knowl-
edge is inseparable from a will to power, a sense of calling to be a "ruler
and a teacher over [his] [older] brethren," Laman and Lemuel (1 Nephi
2:22). Even as Nephi seems to observe his father's authority as prophet
and father (1 Nephi 1:16; 16:20-27), he insistently characterizes his
own narrative in negative terms as addressing not the "things of my
father" but the "things of God," his real Father, as it were (1 Nephi 6:3).
It is made clear that although Nephi makes his "record in the language
of [his] father," his record is "[made] with [his] own hand . . . [and]
according to [his] knowledge," gained by direct revelation from God
(1 Nephi 1:3). He unabashedly filters his historical chronicle through
that which is "expedient to [him]," "speak[ing] somewhat of the things
of [his] father, and also of [his] brethren" only insofar as they contrib-
ute to "[his] account" of "[his] reign and ministry" (1 Nephi 10:1; com-
pare 1 Nephi 1:16-17; 10:15).

The sheer "me" factor of Nephi's first-person narrative might be
seen as enacting within The Book of Mormon itself something analogous
to the higher criticism's reduction of scripture to cultural text, which
brings the text's rac(ial)ism into a new light (see Sheehan 2005). It
becomes ever clearer that Nephi writes to a particular people, namely,

448 American Literature

"my people" (2 Nephi 33:1-4). Hence, one has every right to be skepti-
cal when, in the course of celebrating his rise to sacred kingship over
his prosperous people, he relates that he cursed his brethren with "a
skin of blackness," callously punctuating the account of his brothers'
divine misfortune with the comment that "we" — a first-person plural
that now emphatically excludes his brothers and their descendants —
"lived after the manner of happiness" (2 Nephi 5:27). The fact that
many white Mormon readers haven't been so skeptical (in fact, Nephi
is often lionized in contemporary Mormonism) has less to do with The
Book of Mormon itself than with their own susceptibility to identify-
ing with the narrative power that comes with whiteness and with the
ironic adaptation to The Book of Mormon of a literalist hermeneutic that
understands its duty to scripture to consist largely in taking the text
at face value. The frankly limited scope of not only the two books of
Nephi but the additional books designated as the "small plates" (the
first six books of The Book of Mormon, each narrated in the first person
and ostensibly unabridged by the eponymous editor, Mormon) in the
name of privileging "spiritual" things instead becomes a measure of
the profane imperatives of ethnocentrism. Hence, it is fitting that the
vaunted small plates eventually peter out into something like pure ide-
ology. The series of minor writers in the final short books of Jarom and
Omni evince little to no prophetic intent. Rather than writing accord-
ing to the "commandments of the Lord," these admittedly "wicked"
fighting men write only "according to the commandment of [their]
father[s] .. .that our genealogy might be kept" (Jarom 1:1; Omni 1:2-3,
9). They write only to prop up Nephite cultural identity (compare
N. Reynolds 1987). Hence, The Book of Mormon's replication of the pro-
cess of canon formation does not simply function as a critique of the
existing canon and justification of its own inclusion therein; it draws
our attention to the partiality of any process of canon formation, includ-
ing its own. Bushman (2005, 87) is much closer than Givens to the
mark when he deems The Book of Mormon "almost postmodern" in its
concern with the conditions of its own production. The Book of Mor-
mon's metatextual navel gazing profoundly destabilizes its self-canoniz-
ing narrative, opening it to ethical critique from without and within.
One could say The Book of Mormon precociously illustrates, against
itself, the truism of 1990s culture warriors on the Left: canonization
presupposes the victimization of an Other. The American scripture
thus comes into view as an ethnocentric document, the governing cul-
tural myth of the Nephite people.

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 449

The Book of Mormon's canon busting thus fully turns back on itself.
Beneath the aporia preemptively acknowledged by the white Nephite
narrators — the instructive "imperfections" in the record of a failed
people — are a set of deeper, archival aporia that fundamentally chal-
lenge the narrative's authority Beyond the white Nephite narrative's
self-deconstruction lie the traces of something like a "Lamanite view of
Book of Mormon history" (Bushman 2004). It is as though The Book of
Mormon's obsession with provenance is so extreme as to dictate even
the threatening disclosure of alternative versions of its own story. For
instance, it is revealed that the Lamanites at least intermittently kept
their own record, which prompted some nineteenth-century Mormon
hermeneuts to speculate that Lamanites may have retained copies of
The Book of Mormon record even after Moroni buried the gold plates
(Mosiah 24:6; see G. Reynolds 1888, 82-83). When Lamanite voices
are heard in The Book of Mormon, they offer a coherent and convincing
counterreading of Book of Mormon history. In an epistle to a Nephite
military leader, the Lamanite Ammoron writes back — a rare Lamanite
primary document, as it were:

Behold, your fathers did wrong their brethren, insomuch that they
did rob them of their right to the government when it rightly belonged
to them. ... If ye will lay down your arms, and subject yourselves to
be governed by those to whom the government doth rightly belong,
then will I cause that my people shall lay down their weapons and
shall be at war no more. . . . [Otherwise] we will wage a war which
shall be eternal, either to the subjecting the Nephites to our author-
ity or to their eternal extinction. And as concerning that God whom
ye say we have rejected, behold, we know not such a being; neither
do ye; but if it so be that there is such a being, we know not but that
he hath made us as well as you. And if it so be that there is a devil and
hell, behold will he not send you there to dwell with my brother
whom ye have murdered, whom ye have hinted that he hath gone to
such a place? (Alma 54:17-18, 20, 21-24; compare Mosiah 10:12)

Ammoron's rhetorical questions powerfully interrogate Nephite self-
righteousness. They more than suggest a sophisticated Lamanite
worldview that Nephite accusations of savagery would deny. Most
importantly, this relativizing perspective suggests that the Nephites
are not simply pure vessels of sacred truth but purveyors of the "tradi-
tions of their fathers," hamstrung by "custom" no less than the Laman-
ites to whom the Nephite narrative typically attaches these derogatory

450 American Literature

terms (Alma 9:16-17; 17:9,15, 20, 25; 47:17, 23). In sum, The Book of
Mormon suggests it is not its own "whole story"; it "formally resists
completion," as Elizabeth Fenton (2013, 353) has put it in her ground-
breaking recent Americanist literary treatment of the text.

This apocalypse of the white Nephite narrative — the revelation of its
rac(ial)ist partiality — is the ultimate implication of The Book of Mor-
mon's distinctive racial apocalypse — which has the descendants of the
black Lamanites rather than the white Nephites building the New Jeru-
salem on the American continent. The Book of Mormon's spiritual mes-
sage of Lamanite liberation, I want to argue, depends for its full impact
on engendering skepticism toward the white Nephite narrative. Put
another way, the text's radical eschatological content is best articu-
lated not by what — for all their tragic self-effacement — the white
Nephite narrators do say but what they conspicuously do not or rather
cannot say. Along these lines, it is of the greatest significance that the
full utterance of Lamanite liberation theology awaits nothing less than
the apocalyptic intervention of the very voice of God in the text: it is
the resurrected Christ himself, during his visit to ancient America,
who offers the most thorough exposition of what I've called Amerin-
dian apocalypse. Two passages — among those most quoted in early
Mormon discourse, according to Grant Underwood's careful survey —
are especially significant, detailing as they do the future relationship
between the Gentiles, identified with the white Euro-Americans to
whom The Book of Mormon would eventually be revealed, and "the
remnant of Jacob," identified with the Amerindian descendants of the
surviving Lamanites, in the making of an American millennium
(Underwood 1993, 78):

If they [the white American Gentiles] will repent and hearken unto
my words ... I will establish my church among them, and they shall
come in unto the covenant and be numbered among this the rem-
nant of Jacob [the American Indians] , unto whom I have given this
land [the American continent] for their inheritance. And they shall
assist my people, the remnant of Jacob, and also as many of the
house of Israel as shall come, that they may build a city, which shall
be called the New Jerusalem (3 Nephi 21:22-23).

This extraordinary passage, endowed with special authority as an
utterance of Jesus, upends all of the common racist assumptions of
antebellum white America. In Jesus's millennial scheme, it is not the
Indian "remnant of Jacob" that must repent, but rather the white Amer-

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 451

ican Gentiles. It is not the Indians who will be gathered into the benev-
olent fold of white Christian America, but rather repentant white Amer-
icans who will be gathered into the American house of Israel, privileged
to be "numbered among the remnant of Jacob," a striking reversal of
the trope of black Lamanites being privileged to be "numbered among"
righteous white Nephites. America is suddenly no longer the promised
land of white Christians, but rather the "land of [Indian] inheritance."
And, finally, it is not the Indians who will secondarily "assist" white
Christians in the building of the millennial kingdom, but rather gath-
ered white Christians who will be privileged to "assist" the Indians in
establishing the New Jerusalem. According to Book of Mormon escha-
tology, then, the means to creating Zion was not through a white Chris-
tian Utopia, but rather "a powerfully and divinely reinstated Indian
nation" (Jensen 2000, 179).

And if the white American Gentiles did not repent "after the bless-
ing which they shall receive, after they have scattered my people," the
Amerindian "remnant of Jacob,"

Then shall ye, who are a remnant of the house of Jacob ... be among
them ... as a young lion among the flocks of sheep, who, if he
goeth through both treadeth down and teareth in pieces, and none
can deliver. . . . For I will make my people with whom the Father hath
covenanted, yea, I will make thy horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs
brass. And shalt beat in pieces many people (3 Nephi 20:15- 16, 19).

In this searing prophecy, Amerindian peoples become "invincible
weapons of divine indignation," a force that will reverse the effects of
white American Gentile imperialism, reclaiming for Indian Israel what
The Book of Mormon reveals is rightly hers (Jensen 2000, 181). Implicit
in this apocalyptic vision is the definition of white Gentile repentance
as acknowledging and abiding by Native sovereignty. White American
salvation depends upon being adopted into the Amerindian "remnant
of Jacob." Book of Mormon eschatology thus prescribed for white Euro-
Americans an ethnoracial conversion into Amerindians, the exact mir-
ror image of the white Nephite — and, often, white Mormon — fantasy
of converted Lamanites becoming "fair and delightsome." It is hard to
imagine a vision more profoundly disruptive of US state ideology than
The Book of Mormon's Indianized millennium.

By giving Christ himself the most thorough exposition of Amerin-
dian apocalypse, The Book of Mormon makes a vital distinction between
the voice of God and the voices of the Nephite narrators who claim

452 American Literature

inspiration from God. Implicit in this arrangement is the question of
how capable the Nephite narrators are of faithfully transmitting the
message of Lamanite liberation. In fact, Christ makes the question
explicit in what is certainly the most remarkable of what I've called the
text's archival aporia. Just after having laid out his sweeping vision of
Amerindian apocalypse, Jesus is brought — at his request — the Nephite
records for his perusal. He immediately queries Nephi, a namesake
of the original, regarding the prophecy of his "servant, Samuel, the
Lamanite" regarding the resurrection of the saints, no mention of
which he finds upon the Nephite plates. 4 His tone is rebuking: "How be
it that ye have not written this thing," he pointedly asks, and "Nephi
remembered that this thing had not been written," even though, he
acknowledges, "all" the words of Samuel had been "fulfilled" (3 Nephi
23:9-13). Laid bare here is a reluctance on the part of the Nephite
prophets to include in their narrative something they themselves rec-
ognize as true prophecy, because, at least in part it seems, it came from
a Lamanite. The text's editorial process is brought into view, and it is at
least suggested that the values governing that process may have as
much to do with ethnic pride as divine inspiration.

The literal voice of God in the text singles out for distinction pre-
cisely the voice the Nephite narrative does not, at least not willingly,
include — the prophetic voice of the Lamanite. It is only this voice that
can properly convey the full significance of Amerindian apocalypse —
Christ may give it its most thorough exposition but its most complete
expression comes from Samuel. Christ may sound the Amerindian
apocalypse, but Samuel provides us with a tangible sense of its sound,
as it were — the echoes with which such a transformed world would
reverberate. It is significant that Samuel is always identified as "the
Lamanite" rather than, say, an "Ammonite." He is depicted as an inter-
loper in rather than a resident of Zarahemla (Helaman 13:2) , which dis-
tinguishes him from the sons of Mosiah's Lamanite converts, who
lived under Nephite protection in Zarahemla and "became" Nephite —
and white (Alma 53:10). Samuel, by contrast, comes from and returns
to "his own country . . . and his own people" (Helaman 16:7). His brac-
ing otherness is immediately manifest in his incorrigible refusal and
pointed inversion of Nephite paternalism. Samuel proclaims that if the
Nephites "have been a chosen people of the Lord" in the past, then that
time has passed, the Lord having passed his favor on to the Lamanites
(Helaman 15:3). It is clear that the Lamanite prophet cedes nothing to

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 453

the Nephites as his supposed spiritual superiors. If the white Nephites
had long interpreted the black Lamanites in instrumental terms as a
providential "scourge" meant to "chasten" them towards humility, then
the Lamanite Samuel turns the tables to interpret the Nephites as
mere instruments in the hands of the Lord to restore the Lamanites to
their rightful place: "Salvation hath come unto [the Lamanites]
through the preaching of the Nephites; and for this intent hath the
Lord prolonged their [the Nephites'] days" (1 Nephi 2:24; Helaman
15:4). Once given the chance at salvation extended to the Nephites so
many times over so many centuries, Samuel proclaims, the Lamanites
demonstrate a unique "steadfastness" entirely foreign to the Nephites
(Helaman 15:10; compare Alma 24:19; 26:32-33; Helaman 6:1, 4).
Indeed, if the "more part" of the Lamanites are now "in the path of
their duty, and . . . walk circumspectly before God," then the "more
part" of the Nephites now do not believe the words of prophets like
Samuel (Helaman 15:5; 16:6). In the end, Samuel prophesies, the Lord
will "prolong" the Lamanites' "days" as an end rather than means —
"because of their firmness when they are once enlightened" (Helaman
15:10). But Samuel goes even farther, imbuing the noble Lamanite
character itself rather than "the preaching of the Nephites" with sav-
ing power, venturing that "even if [the Lamanites] should dwindle in
unbelief, the Lord shall prolong their days" (Helaman 15:11, my empha-
sis). Needless to say, the Nephites did not warrant such a promise.
Instead of a white Nephite missionary weepily deigning to make his
benighted black brethren aware of the eternal fate that awaits them
unless they abandon "the traditions of their fathers," the spectacle
Samuel presents is of an enlightened dark prophet bluntly advising, in
vivid and violent language, his fair Nephite brethren that "four hun-
dred years pass not away save the sword of justice falleth upon this
people" (Helaman 15:4; 13:5; compare Mosiah 28:3).

Ultimately, Samuel goes so far as to reverse the curse. But in so doing
he doesn't merely transvalue white and black; he eliminates racial dif-
ference as symptom or sign of divine accursedness. More precisely,
he suggests that the reason the Nephites will fall is precisely because
of their facile equation of divine approval with outward appearances
like skin color. Perhaps the most fundamental presupposition of the
Nephite narrative is what Mormons sometimes call the "pride cycle":
God blesses the righteous with material prosperity, leading them
to forget God and become wicked, leading God to chasten them with

454 American Literature

misfortune, leading them to humble themselves before God and return
to righteousness, thereby initiating the sequence again. Interestingly,
this metanarrative is most succinctly laid out in one of Mormon's edi-
torial intrusions in the chapter just before Samuel's sermon appears
(Helaman 12). This arrangement recalls the initial pronouncement of
the curse of the Lamanites with "a skin of blackness" in the context of
Nephi's narration of his industrious people's material achievements —
crops and livestock flourish, buildings and temples are constructed,
plates and swords are forged. That passage assembles outward signs —
whiteness and settler prosperity, on the one hand, blackness and
nomadic poverty, on the other — into a sturdy evaluative edifice: How
do you know if God favors you? If you're white and rich. The Nephite
narrative's moral equation of righteousness and prosperity and its
racial hierarchy are twinned expressions of a literalist confidence in
the self-evident meaning of the world — you can tell good people from
bad people based on how much stuff they have or what they look like.
One can take things at face value. Hence, Samuel's chiastic double
curse of the Nephites — "ye are cursed because of your riches, and also
are your riches cursed because ye have set your hearts upon them" —
functions as a critique not merely of materialism but of the literalist
logic that also underwrites the narrative's simplistic dichotomy of
white-prosperous-good/black-impoverished-bad. Samuel is concerned
not with the alleged signs of divine accursedness but the substance of
moral failure. If the Nephites are cursed, Samuel suggests, it is because
they have cursed themselves by believing in racial curses, by compla-
cently trusting in whiteness and other superficial qualities as reliable
indices of the providential direction of things. Like many Native and
African American prophets of the nineteenth century, Samuel thus
undermines a crass providentialism of victors that aligns financial
might and the racially white with divine right, eclipsing the Nephite
narrative's most basic assumptions in the process. The inclusion of
Samuel's voice in The Book of Mormon represents not only an aporia
but an apocalypse within and of the text that completes the internal —
and thus divinely approved, as it were — case for reading the Nephite
narrative with a hermeneutics of suspicion. Paradoxically, The Book of
Mormon is a scripture whose successful inculcation — at least so far as
its eschatology is concerned — demands that we not read it as "scrip-
ture" insofar as that honorific presupposes a naive literalist cession of
transcendental authority to the narrative voice. It systematically dis-
ables the very hermeneutic that enabled so many antebellum Ameri-

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 455

cans to find confirmation of common-sense racism in the unquestion-
ably sure voice of the Bible. It challenges not only the Bible's monopoly
on authority but the notion that any single text — however high and holy
its claims and tones — including itself, might warrant the type of all-in,
nonnegotiable investment made by the literalist reader.

Instead of a literalist fetishization of one — or, with its addition, two —
holy books, and the concomitant elevation of the bearers of those
books, The Book of Mormon points us to an expanding library of holy
books produced by God's children in every corner of the world (com-
pare Fenton 2013, 357-58):

Thou fool, that shall say: A Bible, we have got a Bible, and we need
no more Bible. . . . Know ye not there are more nations than one?
Know ye not that I, the Lord your God, have created all men, and
that I remember those who are upon the isles of the sea .... For I
command all men, both in the east, and in the west, and in the north,
and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write
words which I speak unto them; for out of the books which shall be
written I will judge the world, every man according to their works,
according to that which is written (2 Nephi 29:6-7, 11).

The Book of Mormon's Amerindian apocalypse not only undoes the
white supremacist apocalypse of many Euro-American biblicists; it
opens onto a globalist apocalypse whose standard of judgment is truly
ecumenical. One should expect to find holy books and covenant peo-
ples everywhere. It is the achievement of this mindset that signals "the
dispensation of the fulness of times." Sacred history cannot simply be
switched to the autopilot mode of extending Euro-Christian empire;
instead, it requires that empire's dismantling. The Book of Mormon
thus indexes, providentially or not, a theological, cultural, and literary
sea change beyond biblical Christianity driven by the disorienting cul-
tural encounters of Atlantic modernity. It embodies the cosmic scandal
of "Americanity" (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992).

Johns Hopkins University
Notes

1 Although Joseph Smith "before his death, had begun replacing the skin-
color references with terms that clearly referred instead to spiritual qual-
ity ["white" to "pure," for instance]" and never referred to the Nephite-
Lamanite division in explicitly racial terms, it is clear that most early

456 American Literature

readers apprehended "Lamanite" as an ethnoracial category that corre-
sponded to contemporary nonwhite, specifically Amerindian, peoples
(Mauss 2003, 116-19; see Campbell 1996 for details of textual history):
witness the on-the-spot 1830 response of an outsider, German Reformed
pastor Diedrich Willers (1973), and the considered 1887 response of an
insider, David Whitmer, who referred to the Nephites as a "white race"
(1887, 12).

2 For the widely publicized controversy (Kennedy 2003, "Mormons and
Genetics" 2002) regarding biological evidence against Israelite emigra-
tion to the Americas, see Murphy (2002), Southerton (2004), Murphy and
Southerton (2003), and Barney's (2003) response. Mormon apologists
have rallied to John Sorenson's (1996) "limited geography" model of The
Book of Mormon, which has been taken to suggest that the peoples
described in the text were such a small and localized portion of ancient
America's inhabitants that one should perhaps not expect to find an obvi-
ous genetic imprint in contemporary Native peoples, a position reflected
in recent public stances taken by the LDS Church (Peggy Fletcher Stack,
"Single Word Change in Book of Mormon Speaks Volumes," Salt Lake Tri-
bune, November 8, 2007; "Book of Mormon and DNA Studies" 2014).

3 Many readers of The Book of Mormon sense that the narrative's overt rac-
ism on some level unravels amid its textual complexity but locate that
unraveling too readily. Mormon apologist John Tvedtnes (2003) posits a
distinction between a "curse" that consisted in separation from righ-
teous tradition and a "mark" — "the skin of blackness" — that enforced
that curse. But this does little to resolve what Fenton (2013, 354) calls
"the vexed racial politics" of The Book of Mormon insofar as it suggests
God's willingness to work with antiblack racism in order to maintain the
purity of tradition. Tvedtnes cites moments in the text when the Laman-
ites and Nephites trade moral places as evidence that "external differ-
ences such as skin color ... do not necessarily signify spiritual states,"
but the narrative's supposedly salutary sense of race's malleability always
skews in a particular direction: the primary exemplum of how racial dif-
ference is "temporary" in The Book of Mormon is the whitening of Lama-
nite converts. Tvedtnes's downplaying gloss on The Book of Mormon's, ref-
erences to Lamanite whitening illustrates the limitations of his approach:
"Whether this change occurred through intermarriage or some other
unknown process, the event for the Nephites was apparently unique and
unprecedented. Within the context of Nephite society and culture, this
exceptional event would no doubt have been viewed as a sign from God
that such distinctions were irrelevant for those numbered with Christ."
That Tvedtnes himself is reading from "within the context of Nephite
society and culture," as it were, is evinced by the fact that, logically
speaking, the evidence that racial "distinctions were irrelevant" within
the body of Christ would not be that the Lamanites turned white to look

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 457

like Nephites but that the Lamanites retained their black skins. Non-Mor-
mon scholars in the academy have occasionally fallen into similar difficul-
ties in their attempts to read The Book of Mormon as more than a proof-
text of garden-variety nineteenth-century racism. Fenton, following
Craig Prentiss (2003, 128-29), emphasizes that "the Lamanites' story
begins, but does not end, with racial delineation, and the 'skin of black-
ness' that covers them may be removed or transferred elsewhere" (Fen-
ton 2013, 355). My point is that although the narrative does hold out for
the black Lamanites a pathway to Tightness, which may seem to relativ-
ize the initial racial distinction, the fact that that pathway also seems to
run to or through whiteness shows how the narrative actually reinforces
racial distinction with a vengeance.
4 Grant Adamson (2013) has noted that another impetus for this extraordi-
nary passage might be a claim made by Thomas Paine in a late-life "exam-
ination" of New Testament prophecies that was eventually made part 3 of
The Age of Reason, a text with which the Smith family had a history (Bush-
man 2005, 25). Paine had targeted the mention of the resurrection of the
saints in Matthew 27 as a fabrication since it was not prophesied else-
where in scripture. Samuel's prophecy in The Book of Mormon thus might
be read as an answer to Paine's promise of belief if such a prophecy could
be supplied. Adamson's reading only makes Samuel's prophecy weight-
ier, and so the fact that The Book of Mormon does not include any descrip-
tion of the resurrection of the saints only underscores my question: Why
does the narrative so extravagantly deny itself something that would oth-
erwise serve its purposes? The narrative's explicitly flagged and nonethe-
less persistent failure to report fully a prophecy that enjoyed reported
fulfillment, explicit divine endorsement, and special critical utility in The
Book of Mormon's, moment of publication becomes another measure of
the Nephite narrative's partiality.

References

Adamson, Grant. 2013. "Thomas Paine and the Prophecy of Samuel the Lama-
nite." Paper presented at Faith and Knowledge Conference, Wesley Theo-
logical Seminary, Washington, DC, February 22.

Barney, Kevin L. 2003. "A Brief Review of Murphy and Southerton's 'Galileo
Event.'" FairMormon website. Accessed April 8, 2014. www.fairmormon
.org/perspectives/publications/a-brief-review-of-murphy-and-southertons
-galileo-event.

Bay, Mia. 2000. The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas
about White People, 1830-1925. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

"Book of Mormon and DNA Studies." 2014. Official website of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Accessed April 8, 2014. www.lds.org
/topics/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies.

458 American Literature

Bowes, John P. 2007. Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Missis-
sippi West. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Bushman, Richard Lyman. 2004. "The Lamanite View of Book of Mormon
History." In Believing History: Latter-Day Saint Essays, edited by Reid L.
Neilson and Jed Woodworth, 79-92. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

. 2005. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Knopf.

Campbell, Douglas. 1996. "'White' or 'Pure': Five Vignettes." Dialogue: A Jour-
nal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 4: 119-35.

Coviello, Peter. 2002. "The American in Charity: 'Benito Cereno' and Gothic
Anti-Sentimentality." Studies in American Fiction 30, no. 2: 155-80.

Dowd, Gregory Evans. 1992.^4 Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian
Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

England, Eugene. 1985. "'Lamanites' and the Spirit of the Lord." Dialogue:
A Journal of Mormon Thought 18, no. 4: 25-32.

Ernest, John. 2004. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and
the Challenge of History, 1794-1861. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina
Press.

Farmer, Jared. 2008. On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American
Landscape. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.

Fenton, Elizabeth. 2013. "Open Canons: Sacred History and American His-
tory in The Book of Mormon." J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century
Americanists 1, no. 2: 339-61.

Fredrickson, George M. (1971) 1987. The Black Image in the White Mind: The
Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press.

Gipson, Lawrence Henry, ed. 1938. The Moravian Indian Mission on White
River: Diaries and Letters, May 5, 1799, to November 12, 1806. Indianapo-
lis, IN: Indiana Historical Bureau.

Givens, Terryl L. 1997. The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Con-
struction of Heresy. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

. 2002. By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched

a New World Religion. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

. 2009. The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction. New York:

Oxford Univ. Press.

Givens, Terryl L., and Matthew J. Grow. 2011. Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul
ofMormonism. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Grafton, Anthony. 1992. New World, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and
the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.

Guyatt, Nicholas. 2007. Providence and the Invention of the United States,
1607-1876. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Hardy, Grant. 2010. Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide. New
York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Harris, Lacee A. 1985. "To Be Native American — and Mormon." Dialogue:
A Journal of Mormon Thought 18, no. 4: 143-52.

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 459

Holland, David. 2011. Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical
Restraint in Early America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Howe, Stephen. 1998. Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. New
York: Verso.

Hullinger, Robert N. 1992. Joseph Smith's Response to Skepticism. Salt Lake
City, UT: Signature Books.

Jensen, Michael. 2000. "As a Lion among Beasts': Squaring Mormon Views of
the Indian with Those of Nineteenth-Century White America." In Archive
of Restoration Culture: Summer Fellows' Papers, 1997-1999, edited by
Richard Lyman Bushman, 177-84. Provo, UT: Joseph Fielding Smith
Institute for Latter-Day Saint History.

Kennedy, John W. 2003. "Mormon Scholar under Fire: Anthropologist Says
Latter-Day Saints' Teaching about Native Americans Wrong." Christian-
ity Today 47, no. 3: 24-25.

Lee, George P. 1989. "The Lee Letters." Sunstone 13, no. 4: 50-55.

Lewis, R[obert] B[enjamin]. 1844. Light and Truth: Collected from the Bible and
Ancient and Modern History, Containing the Universal History of the Col-
ored and the Indian Race, from the Creation of the World to the Present
Time. Boston: A Committee of Colored Gentlemen.

Livingstone, David N. 2008. Adam's Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics
of Human Origins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

Mauss, Armand L. 2003. All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Concep-
tions of Race and Lineage. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.

Melekin, Embaye. 2000. Manifestations Mysteries Revealed: An Account of
Bible Truth and the Book of Mormon Prophecies. North York, ON: Embaye
Melekin.

Moon, Randall. 1993. "William Apess and Writing White." Studies in Ameri-
can Indian Literature 5, no. 4: 45-54.

"Mormons and Genetics: The Heretic: A Mormon Mentions the Unmention-
able." 2002. Economists, no. 8303: 29.

Murphy, Thomas W. 1996. "Reinventing Mormonism: Guatemala as Harbinger
of the Future." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 1: 177-92.

. 1997. "Fifty Years of United Order in Mexico." Sunstone 20, no. 3: 69.

. 1998. '"Stronger than Ever': Remnants of the Third Convention. "Jour-
nal of Latter-Day Saint History 10: 1-12.

. 1999. "From Racist Stereotype to Ethnic Identity: Instrumental Uses

of Mormon Racial Doctrine." Ethnohistory 46, no. 3: 451-80.

. 2000. "Other Mormon Histories: Lamanite Subjectivity in Mexico."

Journal of Mormon History 26, no. 2: 179-214.

. 2002. "Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics." In American

Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon, edited by Dan Vogel and Brent
Lee Metcalfe, 47-77. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books.

Murphy, Thomas W, and Simon Southerton. 2003. "Genetic Research a 'Gali-
leo Event' for Mormons." Anthropology News 44, no. 2: 20.

460 American Literature

Noll, Mark A. 1982. "The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation,
1776-1885." In The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, edited by
Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, 39-58. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

. 2002. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

O'Donovan, Connell. 2006. "The Mormon Priesthood Ban and Elder Q. Walker
Lewis: An Example for His More Whiter Brethren to Follow.'" John Whit-
mer Historical Association Journal 26: 47-99.

Parry, Keith. 1985. "Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures." Dia-
logue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18, no. 4: 65-80.

Pratt, Parley P. 1972. The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt. Salt Lake City,
UT: DeseretBook.

Prentiss, Craig R. 2003. '"Loathsome unto Thy People': The Latter-Day Saints
and Racial Categorization." In Religion and the Creation of Ethnicity: An
Introduction, edited by Craig R. Prentiss, 124-39. New York: New York
Univ. Press.

Quijano, Anibal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1992. "Americanity as a Concept,
or the Americas in the Modern World- System." International Social Sci-
ence Journal 134: 549-57.

Reynolds, George. 1888. The Story of the Book of Mormon. 3rd ed. Chicago:
Henry C. Etten.

Reynolds. Noel B. 1987. "The Political Dimension in Nephi's Small Plates."

BYU Studies 27, no. 4: 15-37.
Sheehan, Jonathan. 2005. The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship,

Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Smith, Gail K. 1997. "Reading with the Other: Hermeneutics and the Politics

of Difference in Stowe's Dred." American Literature 69, no. 2: 289-313.
Smith, Joseph Jr. 1981. The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ.

Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Smoak, Gregory E. 2006. Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and

American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley and

Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.
Sorenson, John L. 1996. An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon.

Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS.
Southerton, Simon G. 2004. Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and

the Mormon Church. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books.
Sternberg, Meir. 1985. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature

and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
Taylor, Lori Elaine Taylor. 2000. Telling Stories about Mormons and Indians.

PhD diss., State University of New York at Buffalo.
Tvedtnes, John A. 2003. "The Charge of 'Racism' in the Book of Mormon."

FARMS Review 15, no. 2: 183-97.
Underwood, Grant. 1993. The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism. Urbana:

Univ. of Illinois Press.

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse 461

Vogel, Dan. 1986. Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon. Salt Lake City, UT:
SignatureBooks.

Walker, Ronald. 1989. "Toward a Reconstruction of Mormon and Indian Rela-
tions, 1847-77." BYU Studies 29, no. 4: 23-42.

. 1993. "Seeking the 'Remnant': The Native American during the Joseph

Smith Period." Journal of Mormon History 19, no. 1: 1-33.

Whitmer, David. 1887. An Address to All Believers in Christ. By a Witness to
the Divine Authenticity of the Book of Mormon. Richmond, MO: David
Whitmer.

Willers, Diedrich. 1973. "The First Months of Mormonism: A Contemporary
View by Rev. Diedrich Willers." Translated and edited by D. Michael
Quinn. New York History 54, no. 2: 317-33.

Wyss, Hilary E. 2000. Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Com-
munity in Early America. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.